For those who might be new to the whole April/Poem thing, check this month's 1st post. I've been following prompts from Maureen Thorson's NaPoWriMo site and Robert Lee Brewer's Poetic Asides blog.

Maureen's suggestion, since it's Day 5, is a cinquain, essentially a poem with 5 lines. Adelaide Crapsey's invention, the American cinquain, has a set number of syllables in each line: 2, 4, 6, 8, 2 (a total of 20 syllables). Here's a sample I just wrote.

2 When I4 am not sure what6 to write, I go outside8 with trusty sleeping bag to sleep2 and dream.

Today Robert's prompt is "a plus poem." That reminds me of a fun poetic form that uses the "plus," recently invented by Gregory K. Pincus: the fib, based on the Fibonacci sequence. This mathematical pattern starts with 0 and 1 and then each following number is the sum of the previous two: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, etc. The third number is 1 from adding the previous two numbers: 0 plus 1; the fourth number is 3 from 1+2; the fifth is 5 from 2+3; and so on.

The fib's opening line has 1 syllable, then another line with 1 syllable. (It's fascinating that since the Fibonacci sequence begins with 0, the actual "first" line has no syllables, meaning silence.) The fib stops at 6 lines, a last line with 8 syllables (thus a total of 22 syllables). Here's my cinquain from above rearranged into a fib — had to lose 2 syllables and gain 1 line.

01 When1 I'm 2 not sure 3 what to write, 5 I go outside with 8 my sleeping bag to sleep and dream.

Trying to figure out what to do for today's poem, the image of a hand flashed in my mind. I mention hands in my intro above . . . 5 fingers, 5 days. I also wanted to do both prompts, write a cinquain and a fib. So that's how my poem got going. Started describing a hand and ended up somewhere I didn't know I was going. Here we go.

P O E M R E M O V E D

while being submitted for publication.

Please come back later. The poem may
return at some time in the future.

P.S. Remember my abecedarian on April 1st? T. M. Sandrock, a poetry-writing student at the University of Northern Iowa, has invented a new kind of ABC poem: the spiraling abecedarian. A really cool way to do a double abecedarian. Here's Tanner's first one, a truly kickass poem. (That's a technical term, by the way, kickass.) ;-)

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And on the Bass ...

I write poems and stories. Also the occasional creative nonfiction. And I edit the North American Review, the longest-lived literary magazine in the US. I am a Professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa, where I teach creative writing and literature.

I play bass guitar and lead guitar; I also love to bang on the drums! And if you couldn't already tell from the color scheme around here, my favorite color is blue, in all its dynamic shades and flavors: cobalt, electric, royal, robin's-egg, navy, cerulean, teal, indigo, sky.